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Arguing a higher education is more important than ever to good-paying jobs, President Barack Obama laid out his plan to reduce college costs and help students manage their college debt while indirectly chiding Gov. Tom Corbett for "brutal cuts" to education.

"Higher education is not a luxury, it's an economic necessity, and every American should be able to afford it," Mr. Obama told more than 2,700 people late Friday afternoon at Lackawanna College.

The president's second official visit to Scranton wrapped up a two-day bus tour that unveiled new ideas to make higher education more affordable for middle-class families.

Mr. Obama spoke earlier in the day at Binghamton University in Vestal, N.Y., before rolling down Interstate 81 to pick up pies and visit with patrons at Bingham's Restaurant in Lenox Twp. and talk higher education reform in the city Vice President Joseph Biden once called home.

Mr. Obama jabbed at Mr. Corbett without mentioning him by name just after pointing out the average tuition at a four-year public college rose 250 percent over the last three decades and the typical family income rose only 16 percent.

"If you've got the cost of college going up like this and incomes going up like that, you start getting that bigger and bigger gap, and that means it's harder and harder for young people to afford college," he said. "And, meanwhile, states have been cutting back on their higher education budgets. And let's face it, here in Pennsylvania there have been brutal cuts to not just higher education, but education, generally."

As a result, he said, students spend and borrow more to pay for college and graduate with massive debt.

Mr. Corbett's camp treated the comment as campaign-related because he faces re-election next year. His campaign spokesman, Mike Barley, said in a statement that the president "should grab a mirror" if he wants to blame anyone for the education cuts.

"It's his one-time funds from the failed stimulus package that artificially increased the education budget to unsustainable levels," Mr. Barley said. "Despite this legislative malpractice, Gov. Corbett has devoted more state funding to education than any time in our commonwealth's history. The president's comments make it clear that he has no meaningful plans for education reform."

Mr. Corbett argues he had to cut education funding because former Gov. Ed Rendell used Mr. Obama's stimulus package funding to fill the gaps in the state education budget and that money disappeared when the stimulus ended.

Otherwise, Mr. Obama relied heavily on the speech he gave Thursday in Buffalo and Syracuse, N.Y. He said Americans had shown "grit and resilience and hard work" in helping him "clear away the rubble of the (2008) financial crisis."

"But we do have a problem, which is we've got some of our friends down in Washington who - and it's not all Republicans but there's a strong faction - who instead of focusing on what's helping middle-class families succeed, they're spending time arguing about whether or not we should be paying the bills for things we already spent money on," he said, referring to Republicans who want to stop Congress from raising the debt limit in the next few months. "They're threatening to shut down the government and have another financial crisis unless, for example, we get rid of the health care reform that we fought to pass and that's going to provide millions of people health care security for the first time."

Mr. Obama said health care reform is "actually a really good idea."

"It's going to work. It used to be a Republican idea, there's a governor of Massachusetts who set it up," Mr. Obama said of the plan Republicans derisively call "Obamacare" and is modeled after a Massachusetts plan established by former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney when he was governor there. "It's working really well."

"That's not going to help our economy," he said. "That doesn't strengthen the middle class. I have not seen a policy coming out of them that would actually help ordinary folks. And we can't afford the usual Washington circus of distractions and political posturing and special interests and phony scandals. We can't afford that. We've got too much work to do."

Mr. Obama ran through the emphasis the nation once put on higher education, citing the post-World War II GI bill that allowed a myriad of returning soldiers.

He also ran through a series of programs instituted during his administration to help people afford higher education - removing banks from the federal student loan system and shifting the billions in savings to more loans, setting up a consumer watchdog to help students avoid "shady lenders," and capping loan repayments at 10 percent of a student's wages.

Then, Mr. Obama launched into his new proposal.

First, he said, he proposes rating colleges based on graduation rates, how much debt their graduates have, whether they can find jobs and other factors. Colleges that rate more highly will get more federal financial aid, under the president's plan.

"What I want is for us to measure the kind of value they're giving students and their families, and are they providing the opportunity that we should be providing," he said.

Second, he wants to encourage colleges to innovate, offer cheaper, online courses, find out if students can earn credits faster.

"If you can show competency, ... it shouldn't matter how many hours in a classroom you work," he said. "The question is do you know the subject? And if you can accelerate it, you should be able to save money doing it. As it is, Mr. Obama said, students are graduating with an average of more than $26,000 and some far more.

"I get letters from people who have $100,000 worth of debt; young people who've got $120,000 worth of debt. And they may be working as teachers. They may be doing really important work. They may be working as researchers. But they can't pay off that kind of debt," he said.

Third, expand a program to include more students so they can repay college loans at the rate of no more than 10 percent of their annual incomes.

"More than ever before, some form of higher education is the surest path into the middle class, and the surest path that you stay there," he said.

He said the students at Lackawanna College understand the need for higher education.

"That's why they've made sacrifices," he said. "That's why their (families) are making sacrifices. You understand that in the face of global competition - when the Germans and the Chinese and the Indians are all putting more money into education and putting more money into research - that we can't just stand pat."

In a short talk before he introduced the president, Mr. Biden said Scranton is the "perfect place to talk about education."

"Mr. President, the American Dream is alive here in Scranton," he said. "It's alive here in Scranton. And I think I know the reason why it's alive. The values that have made the middle class possible in America still matter here: community, hard work, personal responsibility, faith, family. But most of all, the value that is held most dear by this community - that was held most dear by my mom and dad as they were raising me here, and it's still held dear by everyone - is opportunity."

The vice president cited a recent study that showed Scranton is a place "where poor people have among the best odds of climbing to the middle class."

He was introduced by someone who seemed to illustrate his point - Urica Carver, 31, a single mother of four who graduated from Lackawanna College earlier this year as student government president and with an associate degree in criminal justice and business studies. She is pursuing a bachelor's degree in criminal justice at Keystone College.

"And whether just beginning or returning to higher education, it shouldn't have to be the most expensive investment that we'll ever make," she said.

Contact the writer: bkrawczeniuk@timesshamrock.com

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